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May 31, 2009

President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama landed in New York Sunday
afternoon, and after taking a helicopter from JFK into Manhattan, drove
up the West Side Highway, where the northbound lanes were shut down by
police for their visit, past Ground Zero, into the Village for dinner
at the Village's Blue Hill restaurant. From there, they went north to
Times Square, where they went to to see a production of "Joe Turner's
Come and Gone" at the Belasco Theater on West 44 Street.

Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest read a statement from Obama: "I am
taking my wife to New York City because I promised her during the
campaign that I would take her to a Broadway show after it was all
finished."

Obama also promised a middle class tax cut and healthcare reform, but obviously those can wait. However, the new frugality really is for everyone - we need to drive smaller cars and Obama led the way:

The president traveled in a smaller, Gulfstream-type plane rather than
the larger planes typically used as Air Force One. Two other planes
carried staff and reporters.

Leadership!

Normally an event like this would be dressed up as a fundraiser so the national committee could pick up the tab. I don't have the impression that Michelle would spend her own money on this, so I can't wait to learn how much the taxpayer shelled out for the night out.

This Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous date night was arrogant, it was tone deaf, but it's OK because they're not Republicans.

Let's hope that the Chinese officials worried about their US Treasury holdings don't take the same tone with Obama that Congress took with the Detroit executives.

IT'S ONLY WORDS: Glenn Reynolds ends the Best Title competition with "BLAMING IT ALL on the nights on Broadway". This is a special dagger to my heart since "Nights on Broadway" is one of my all-time fave open road sing-along songs. In fact, my kids often join in with a bit of encouragement along the lines of "Hey, it's that stalker song - let's see if Dad gets "standing in the dark" and "standing in the light" reversed like he always does." Yeah, wait 'til their Alzheimer's kicks in.

If there is a God in Disco Heaven this will all come together on Monday when reporters grill Obama press flack Robert Gibbs about "Nights on Broadway" to the soundtrack of "You Should Be Dancing" and "Jive Talking".

President Barack Obama said he made clear to bank CEOs who visited him
Friday that they need to get rid of lavish bonuses and perks that have
angered the American people.

"Show some restraint," Obama said he told the executives, according to
an interview he taped Friday with Bob Schieffer of CBS News. "Show that
you get that this is a crisis and everybody has to make sacrifices."

Finally, the Obama administration and Democrats in general need to
do everything they can to build an F.D.R.-like bond with the public.
Never mind Mr. Obama’s current high standing in the polls based on
public hopes that he’ll succeed. He needs a solid base of support that
will remain even when things aren’t going well.

And I have to
say that Democrats are off to a bad start on that front. The attempted
coronation of Caroline Kennedy as senator plays right into 40 years of
conservative propaganda denouncing “liberal elites.” And surely I
wasn’t the only person who winced at reports about the luxurious beach
house the Obamas have rented, not because there’s anything wrong with
the first family-elect having a nice vacation, but because symbolism
matters, and these weren’t the images we should be seeing when millions
of Americans are terrified about their finances.

"TODAY" SHOW CHYRONS "BROADWAY BACKLASH" inside the GM package — NBC's
Savannah Guthrie: "Some are criticizing the president for the timing of
a weekend trip to New York. The Obamas took a smaller Air Force One to
the city for a date night. Press and staff followed in two smaller
planes. ... In a statement, the White House responded [to RNC
criticism]: 'The president would have been happy to take the shuttle to
New York City if they'd been permitted to do so.'"

The White House tells us it was a secret service call.

Hmm, the Secret Service refused to let Obama cancel the trip in order to preserve appearances? We underestimate their vast power.

HL Mencken once defined Fundamentalism as "the terrible, pervasive fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun".
I've been thinking of this a lot watching some of the attacks on
Sotomayor, but I'd frame the critics as suffering from the terrible,
pervasive fear that some brown person, somewhere, is getting away with something.

Really? And perhaps the seventeen white guys and the two Hispanics whose promotions on the New Haven fire department have been indefinitely delayed have that same unfocused fear? Or maybe their fear is a bit more real, and a bit closer to home.

Affirmative action is alive and well, it continues to be divisive, and it may be a bit of a disappointment to supporters of our first post-racial President to see him nominating a Latina steeped in identity politics. Is this really the way to end the tired old politics of racial division?

The oddest thing about affirmative action is that it is promoted as a vital program with no actual beneficiaries. Sonia Sotomayor is going to the Supreme Court! Yet instead of hailing this as a triumph of affirmative action (since Princeton might very well have overlooked this qualified candidate many years ago) Ms. Sotomayor and her supporters want to pretend that affirmative action has had nothing to do with her success.

SINCE YOU MENTION IT - More from Ms. McArdle:

But hey, we all get things we don't deserve. I'll go further: almost
all of us get something we don't deserve as a result of our race,
including white people. Perhaps even especially white people.

If
you don't believe it, ask yourself why repeated studies show that
resumes with identifiably black names get fewer interview offers than
identical white resumes. Being identifiably black hurts your chances
worse than having a felony conviction. Even if you want to argue that
an identifiably black name is a socio-economic marker for a certain
kind of parenting, an argument I find pretty dubious, are you really
willing to argue that black kids should be permanently barred from
employment because their parents have dubious taste in names?

Well, I have asked myself that very question, as have others - when the question of "equal resumes" was kicked around a few years back, the suggestions as to why black-sounding names were at a disadvantage was summarized as follows by the CalPundit:

The gist of the thread seemed to be that maybe blacks were more
likely to sue over being fired, or maybe their degrees were perceived
as being worth less due to lower standards caused by affirmative
action...

In other words, if affirmative action distorts the college grading process as well as the recruitment process then equal resumes aren't really equal. The greater legal protection afforded newly hired minorities is obvious.

Or head back to New Haven and its fire department. Presumably, the city will eventually figure out as test that can be passed by an acceptable mix of candidates, and whites, blacks and Hispanics will be promoted. Imagine that a few years from now a small town is looking to hire a Fire Chief. Enterprising researchers re-create the resume test by sending out resumes where the last job held was an officer-level post in the New Haven Fire Department. Will anyone familiar with the background treat that credential as equally significant when applied to either white or black candidates? I would guess that "equal" resumes won't be equally well received.

May 30, 2009

May 29, 2009

The WaPo assures us that the White House is reassuring abortion-rights advocates troubled by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's slim record on that topic:

The White House scrambled yesterday to assuage worries from liberal
groups about Judge Sonia Sotomayor's scant record on abortion rights,
delivering strong but vague assurances that the Supreme Court nominee
agrees with President Obama's belief in constitutional protections for
a woman's right to the procedure.

"Strong but vague". Sounds like a blog title. Excuse me - sounds like it damn well ought to be, well, somebody's blog title.

"In their discussions, they talked about the theory of constitutional
interpretation, generally, including her views on unenumerated rights
in the Constitution and the theory of settled law," Gibbs said. "He
left very comfortable with her interpretation of the Constitution being
similar to that of his."

I recall seeing conservative jurists admit that, although the legal reasoning of Roe is airy and they never would have signed the opinion, it has accumulated enough barnacles over time that directly overturning it would be a mistake. That said, a conservative might be willing to nibble at the edges, and Sotomayer might as well.

Former President Bush gave a public speech which included his thoughts on the Obama-Cheney enhanced interrogation dispute:

Although he did not specifically allude to the high-profile debate
over President Obama's decision to halt the use harsh interrogation
techniques, and without referencing Cheney by name, Bush spoke in broad
strokes about how he proceeded after the capture of Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed in March 2003.

"The first thing you do is ask, what's legal?" he said. "What do the
lawyers say is possible? I made the decision, within the law, to get
information so I can say to myself, 'I've done what it takes to do my
duty to protect the American people.' I can tell you that the
information we got saved lives."

But Bush avoided the sharp tone favored by his former vice president
in recent weeks, and went out of his way to stress that he does not
want to disparage the new president.

"Nothing I am saying is meant to criticize my successor," Bush said.
"There are plenty of people who have weighed in. Trust me, having seen
it firsthand. I didn't like it when a former president criticized me,
so therefore I am not going to criticize my successor. I wish him all
the best."

The first thing you ask is what is legal? The first question ought to be, what makes sense?

FWIW, the NY Times reported a more sensible process, although it went awry at certain points:

When Mr. Bush assigned the C.I.A. with the task of questioning
high-level Qaeda captives in late 2001, the agency had almost no
experience interrogating the kind of hostile prisoners it soon expected
to hold.

It had dozens of psychiatrists, psychologists,
polygraphists and operations officers who had practiced the arts of
eliciting information and assessing truthfulness. Their targets,
however, were not usually terrorists, but foreigners offering to spy
for the United States or C.I.A. employees suspected of misdeeds.

Agency
officials, led by Mr. Tenet, sought interrogation advice from other
countries. And, fatefully, they contacted the military unit that runs
the SERE training program, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which
gives American pilots, special operations troops and others a sample of
the brutal interrogation methods they might face as prisoners of war.
Mr. Tenet declined to be interviewed.

I don't know which foreign countries they would have contacted, but Israel has the most obvious experience with Islamic jihadists, and yes, Israel seems to favor enhanced interrogation.

May 28, 2009

It's going to take a lot of digging to see if there is gold in Dealergate.

The Washington Examiner is a good starting point. The gist - Team Obama is closing Chrysler dealerships that donated to Republicans and allowing Obama donors to live.

The pushback, both here and from Nate Silver - most car dealers are Republican (older, male, small businessman, maybe not so green, maybe not big union guys.) It appears that Reps outnumber Dems by something like 9-1, although the data seem to be hazy as to how many dealers are not donors at all.

The pushback is not wholly convincing; the allegation is that Obama donors are getting a break, not necessarily generic Dem donors to, for example, John Edwards.

However, it is almost surely true that most of the surviving dealers are also Republicans, so statisticians will be left to grapple with the question of whether two populations (the 75% that survived to close another day, which includes maybe 10% Democrats and a smaller portion of Obama donors) is significantly different from the 25% that were closed, which seems to be roughly 90% Rep with no notable Obama donors.

The fact that McLarty, Clinton's former Chief of Staff, was a big winner helps the side arguing for political motivation.

Confounding the data - somewhere in the mix will be black car dealers who gave to Obama. Did they survive because of their donation strategy, because of a race-based initiative by the Administration to promote minority businesses, or because they serve distinctive communities, or some combination? [I still don't know.]

I would be shocked if we found that Obama did not take care of his friends, and even more shocked if this struck people as scandalous. Sure, sure, it was crony capitalism when Bush allegedly did it, but that was then.

May 27, 2009

And for those trying to divine her abortion views, there's one more tea
leaf to read: she was on the board of a group formerly called the
Maternity Center Association, now called Childbirth Connect. They list "20 Rights of Childbearing Women." None of them relate to the "right to choose." In fact, I find no mention of abortion on their website.

Donna Lynne, DrPH, Treasurer, has given to Obama, Salazar, Hillary, and Kerry, so one might think she is a conventional Democrat. She also gave $250 to Republican Rick O'Donnell in 2006; O'Donnell was pro-life but that seems to be incidental to his views on immigration, tax, and spending reform.

Deanne Williams, Assistant Treasurer, gave $200 to the DNC.

Maureen Corry, Assistant Secretary, gave $200 to Hillary in 2007.

That does not lok like a hotbed of NARAL diehards. I would guess that since Childbirth Connect ducks the aborton issue at their website and includes a range of viewpoints among their officers that they are consciously trying to avoid the aorton wars.

So why might that apeal to Sotomayor? She might be an ardent pro-choicer intent on preserving some notion of judicial propriety; she might be a squishy pro-choicer who has preferred to sidestep the issue; or she might be a closeted pro-lifer passing on the left side of the aisle. Inconclusive.

Let's cut back to the Times, which poses a puzzle in political strategizing:

Now some liberal leaders are quietly expressing unease that Judge
Sotomayor may not be a reliable vote to uphold Roe v. Wade, the
landmark 1973 abortion rights decision. In a letter to supporters,
Nancy Keenan, president of the National Abortion Rights Action League,
urged them to pressure senators to demand that Judge Sotomayor reveal
her views on privacy rights before any confirmation vote.

Hmm. And if the pro-abortion leaders don't like her answers, what are they going to do - oppose Obama's historic Latina pick? Starting a fight they are bound to lose and dividing their party as Hillary's former supporters boo the Hispanics - yeah, that sounds dumb enough to be a plausible scenario for the Democrats.

This imagined ignorance of Sotomayor's views is all posturing and puffery, of course:

But in his briefing to reporters on Tuesday, the White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs,
was asked whether Mr. Obama asked Judge Sotomayor about abortion or
privacy rights. He replied that Mr. Obama “did not ask that
specifically.”

Yeah, right. It never dawned on Obama that he would have an Epic Fail if the pro-choicers freaked out and opposed Sotomayor, so he never thought to ask. Heaven help us all if he is really that inept.

Apes began to morph into humans, and the species Homo erectus
emerged some two million years ago, Mr. Wrangham argues, for one
fundamental reason: We learned to tame fire and heat our food.

“Cooked
food does many familiar things,” he observes. “It makes our food safer,
creates rich and delicious tastes and reduces spoilage. Heating can
allow us to open, cut or mash tough foods. But none of these advantages
is as important as a little-appreciated aspect: cooking increases the
amount of energy our bodies obtain from food.”

He continues: “The
extra energy gave the first cooks biological advantages. They survived
and reproduced better than before. Their genes spread. Their bodies
responded by biologically adapting to cooked food, shaped by natural
selection to take maximum advantage of the new diet. There were changes
in anatomy, physiology, ecology, life history, psychology and society.”
Put simply, Mr. Wrangham writes that eating cooked food — whether meat
or plants or both —made digestion easier, and thus our guts could grow
smaller. The energy that we formerly spent on digestion (and digestion
requires far more energy than you might imagine) was freed up, enabling
our brains, which also consume enormous amounts of energy, to grow
larger. The warmth provided by fire enabled us to shed our body hair,
so we could run farther and hunt more without overheating. Because we
stopped eating on the spot as we foraged and instead gathered around a
fire, we had to learn to socialize, and our temperaments grew calmer.

There
were other benefits for humanity’s ancestors. He writes: “The
protection fire provided at night enabled them to sleep on the ground
and lose their climbing ability, and females likely began cooking for
males, whose time was increasingly free to search for more meat and
honey. While other habilines” — tool-using prehumans — “elsewhere in
Africa continued for several hundred thousand years to eat their food
raw, one lucky group became Homo erectus — and humanity began.”

Clearly this piece should have run just before the Memorial Day barbecues, not right after them.

So what about Sotomayor's racist "wise Latina" comment? Let's cut to Ta Nehisi-Coates of The Atlantic for an example of the sort of BS to which we will be subject as the defenders of Ms. Sotomayor ride forth to defend what would be utterly disqualifying if uttered by a middle-aged white guy.

First, some context:

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

Next, the "I've heard worse" defense, which is where the BS begins:

I think we can immediately dispense with the crazies who think this statement should disqualify Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. It's worth noting that William Rehnquist once endorsed segregation, and yet rose to be Chief Justice of the court.

I have no idea whether the author expects his readers to click on the link, or whether he has done so himself. Rehnquist clearly endorses the concept of judicial restraint and expresses the notion that the court should not try to get ahead of public opinion. If Rehnquist is endorsing anything it is a judicial process rather than an outcome.

"Loving v. Virginia", the famous 1967 anti-miscegention case, provides an example of the sort of judicial restaraint touted by Rehnquist. The Supreme Court ducked miscegenation cases throughout the 50's and only joined in after Congress had passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and many states had repealed their miscegenation laws. In 1952 Rehnquist thought the Court should be similarly circumspect in the "Brown v. Board of Education" case, although history has decided differently.

In any case, the Rehnquist "endorsement" was in 1952 and I will bet that he had moved long past it by the time he became Chief Justice. Is there any evidence that Ms. Sotomayor has moved beyond her concept of identity politics?

Having established that it is no big deal, Ta-Nehisi Coates then explains that Sotomayer is wrong:

That said, I think Sotomayor's statement is quite wrong. I understand the basis of it, laid out pretty well by Kerry Howley over at Hit & Run. The idea is that Latinos have a dual experience that whites don't have and that, all things being equal, they'll be able to pull from that experience and see things that whites don't. The problem with this reasoning is it implicitly accepts the logic (made for years by white racists) that there is something essential and unifying running through all white people, everywhere. But White--as we know it--is a word so big that, as a descriptor of experience, it almost doesn't exist.

Indeed, it's claims are preposterous. It seeks to lump the miner in Eastern Kentucky, the Upper West Side Jew, the yuppie in Seattle, the Irish Catholic in South Boston, the hipster in Brooklyn, the Cuban-American in Florida, or even the Mexican-American in California all together, and erase the richness of their experience, by marking the bag "White."

The killing in 1967 of an unarmed demonstrator by a police officer
in West Berlin set off a left-wing protest movement and put
conservative West Germany on course to evolve into the progressive
country it has become today.

Now a discovery in the archives of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, has upended Germany’s
perception of its postwar history. The killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras,
though working for the West Berlin police, was at the time also acting
as a Stasi spy for East Germany.

It is as if the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University
by the Ohio National Guard had been committed by an undercover K.G.B.
officer, though the reverberations in Germany seemed to have run
deeper.

“It makes a hell of a difference whether John F. Kennedy
was killed by just a loose cannon running around or a Secret Service
agent working for the East,” said Stefan Aust, the former editor in
chief of the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel. “I would never, never,
ever have thought that this could be true.”

...For the left, Mr. Kurras’s true allegiance strikes at the underpinnings
of the 1968 protest movement in Germany. The killing provided the
clear-cut rationale for the movement’s opposition to what its members
saw as a violent, unjust state, when in fact the supposed fascist
villain of leftist lore was himself a committed socialist.

...The most insidious question raised by the revelation is whether Mr.
Kurras might have been acting not only as a spy, but also as an agent
provocateur, trying to destabilize West Germany. As the newspaper Bild
am Sonntag put it in a headline, referring to the powerful former
leader of the dreaded East German security agency, Erich Mielke, “Did
Mielke Give Him the Order to Shoot?”

Mr. Kurras admits that he had been a member of the Communist Party but denies being a spy an claims the shooting was an accident.

How will the case turn out? This much seems clear: the Court will
not adopt the Second Circuit’s reasoning that to ask whether trust
costs would have been incurred had the property not been held in trust
is to ask whether the trust costs could have been incurred outside a
trust. Indeed, the government’s lawyer led with this position, but just
a few minutes into his argument Justice Roberts asked, to general
laughter, “You didn’t think much of this argument before the Second
Circuit adopted it, did you? You didn’t argue this before the Court of
Appeals?” The government's lawyer acknowledged that Justice Roberts was
correct.

“So you have a fallback argument,” Justice Roberts said.

“Well, that—that’s right.”

“Well, now might be a good time to fall back,” Justice Roberts suggested.

The SCOTUS blog has a detailed review of other opinions written by Ms. Sotomayor. The summary:

Since joining the Second Circuit in 1998, Sotomayor has authored over
150 opinions, addressing a wide range of issues, in civil cases. To
date, two of these decisions have been overturned by the Supreme Court;
a third is under review and likely to be reversed. In those two cases
(and likely the third), Sotomayor’s opinion was rejected by the Supreme
Court’s more conservative majority and adopted by its more liberal
dissenters (including Justice Souter). Those outcomes suggest that
Sotomayor’s views would in many respects be similar to those of Justice
Souter.

Both the SCOTUS blog and the WSJ Law Blog note an interesting Second Amendment case, Maloney v. Cuomo. From the SCOTUS blog:

Second Amendment: Sotomayor was also a member of the
panel that issued a per curiam opinion in another controversial case
that may be headed for the Court next year. In Maloney v. Cuomo,
554 F.3d 56 (2009), the panel considered (as relevant here) a claim by
a New York attorney that a state law prohibiting possession of a chuka
stick (also known as nunchaku, a device used in martial arts consisting
of two sticks joined by a rope or chain) violated his Second Amendment
right to bear arms. The district court rejected the claim on the
ground that the Second Amendment does not apply to the states. On
appeal, the panel affirmed. Relying on the Supreme Court’s 1886
decision in Presser v. Illinois, it explained that it was
“settled law . . . that the Second Amendment applies only to
limitations the federal government seeks to impose” on the individual’s
right to bear arms. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, the court continued, “does not invalidate this longstanding principle.” And while acknowledging the possibility that “Heller might be read to question the continuing validity of this principle,” the panel deemed itself bound to follow Presser
because it “directly controls, leaving to the Supreme Court the
prerogative of overruling its own decisions.” Maloney’s lawyers intend
to file a petition for certiorari in late June.

May 26, 2009

David Brooks goes off the Obama Kool-Aid for a day, with humorous results:

There is nothing so inspiring as public service, so I’ve been
incredibly moved over the past few weeks to watch squads of corporate
executives come to the White House so President Obama could announce
that he was giving away their money.

...

These executives have been invited to make these donations in the
same spirit that the Cossacks invited my ancestors to emigrate to the
Lower East Side. And yet there is a moment during each of the
ceremonies when the spirit of the Almighty descends upon the
congregation. It usually happens while the president is describing the
glorious future. He’ll be describing how, in three years, he will slash
the deficit by cutting taxes and doubling spending. He will be
describing how, in three years, he will create millions of jobs by
raising energy costs.

You can see the ecstasy of Washington
promise-making spread joy from soul to soul. Infected by these visions,
automakers vow that in three years they will have created a resurgence
of enthusiasm around the Chevy Aveo. Financiers vow they will build an
entirely new banking industry that doesn’t rely so much on loan
repayment. Health care executives vow that in three years they’ll
perform CAT scans at Kinko’s.

Some say these are just
meaningless promises that ignore hard choices and that no one has any
intention of keeping. But this is ungenerous. At these events, the
president has taken former rivals and has joined them in the holy bonds
of mutual fantasy. He has taken a divided nation and has given us
photo-ops to bind us and remind us of our common humanity. Business
lies down with government. Management embraces labor. You call it what
you will; I call it beautiful.

WASHINGTON — President Obama announced on Tuesday that he will nominate the federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court,
choosing a daughter of Puerto Rican parents raised in Bronx public
housing projects to become the nation’s first Hispanic justice.

Judge Sotomayor, who stood next to the president during the
announcement, was described by Mr. Obama as “an inspiring woman who I
am confident will make a great justice.”

The president said he had made his decision after “deep reflection
and careful deliberation,” and he made it clear that the judge’s
inspiring personal story was crucial in his decision. Mr. Obama praised
his choice as someone possessing “a rigorous intellect, a mastery of
the law.”

But those essential qualities are not enough, the president said.
Quoting Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mr. Obama said, “The life of the
law has not been logic, it has been experience.” It is vitally
important that a justice know “how the world works, and how ordinary
people live,” the president said.

Let's see - biography is destiny in Obama's America, a land he loves because it made his story possible, the story of a black man seeking this and that hooking up with a white chick looking for one thing or another... was any of that in Obama's speech today, or did he show mercy and compassion by dropping it?

Well, if being in touch with ordinary Americans is the criteria, Sotomayer is a major upgrade from Souter.

This NY Times article from May 14 provided some troubling quotes, including this:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a
white male who hasn’t lived that life,” said Judge Sotomayor...

Oh, boy - if I had to defend that, I would focus on the "I would hope" qualifier. She is a Latina women, she no doubt aspires to wisdom, and she ought to hope that the combination would amount to something useful. That said, if a similar quote had emerged for Roberts or Alito the nominaton woud have been withdrawn. Jonathan Adler of the Volokh Conspiracy had thoughts.

That quote is from this address and it does not get less offensive in context. The speech does provide some guideposts that may point her critics towards some interesting areas. For example:

The aspiration to impartiality is just that--it's an aspiration because
it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different
choices than others. Not all women or people of color, in all or some
circumstances or indeed in any particular case or circumstance but
enough people of color in enough cases, will make a difference in the
process of judging. The Minnesota Supreme Court has given an example of
this. As reported by Judge Patricia Wald formerly of the D.C. Circuit
Court, three women on the Minnesota Court with two men dissenting
agreed to grant a protective order against a father's visitation rights
when the father abused his child.

You go, girls! But was this decision based on a plausible reading of the law, or was it legislation from the bench? I can't track down the case but the answer might be illuminating.

The New Haven case will get a lot of attention; from the Times:

On the appeals court, Judge Sotomayor has not been involved in many
hotly disputed decisions, but one that she participated in is before
the Supreme Court right now. As part of a panel, she voted to uphold
New Haven’s decision to throw out a set of fire department promotion
tests because no minority candidates made the top of the list. White
firefighters who scored high but were denied promotion are appealing
that ruling.

LAST GASP: Stanley Fish on empathetic judges, justice, and the law. Ann Althouse advises the right to plan on losing gracefully and sharpening their arguments for next time. Hmm, I am pretty sure we don't do either "graceful" or "sharp", but time will tell.

May 25, 2009

Clark Hoyt, ombudsman of the NY Times, goes into the tank for Edmund Andrews, author of "Busted", who was busted by Megan McArdle.

To recap - Edmund Andrews, Times financial reporter, is promoting a new book claiming to detail his personal journey through the dark underside of easy mortgages and financial distress.

The NY Times gave him space in the NY Times magazine to talk up his story and his book. But missing from the story is any mention of the fact that his wife has filed for personal bankruptcy not once, but twice. For a story about personal finances, that is a staggering omission, leading to some absurd phoniness in the Andrews tale.

Andrews is an excellent reporter who explains complex issues
clearly. There are plenty of them to cover without assigning him to
those that could directly affect whether he keeps his own house. He is
too close to that story.

He can’t be too cautious. On Thursday, he came under attack from a blogger
for The Atlantic for not mentioning in his book that his wife had twice
filed for bankruptcy — the second time while they were married, though
Andrews said it involved an old loan from a family member. He said he
had wanted to spare his wife any more embarrassment. The blogger said
the omission undercut Andrews’s story, but I think it was clear that he
and his wife could not manage their finances, bankruptcies or no.
Still, he should have revealed the second one, if only to head off the
criticism.

Brad DeLong and Felix Salmon note that "the blogger" has a name, a lofty title (Business and Economics Editor of The Atlantic), and a well-deserved reputation for diligence and accuracy.

Let me join the bashing with a frontal assault - there is no way the Andrews story can be read as an accurate, honest depiction of his experience. This, for example, is from the NY Times magazine (my emphasis):

The only problem was money. Having separated from my wife of 21
years, who had physical custody of our sons, I was handing over $4,000
a month in alimony and child-support payments. That left me with
take-home pay of $2,777, barely enough to make ends meet in a
one-bedroom rental apartment. Patty [Andrews' new wife] had yet to even look for a job. At
any other time in history, the idea of someone like me borrowing more
than $400,000 would have seemed insane.

But this was unlike any other time in history. My real estate agent gave me the number of Bob Andrews, a loan officer at American Home Mortgage
Corporation. Bob wasn’t related to me, and I had never heard of his
company. “Bob can be very helpful,” my agent explained. “He specializes
in unusual situations.”

Bob returned my call right away. “How big a mortgage do you think you’ll need?” he asked.

“My
situation is a little complicated,” I warned. I told him about my child
support and alimony payments and said I was banking on Patty to earn
enough money to keep us afloat. Bob cut me off. “I specialize in
challenges,” he said confidently.

...

Bob called back the next
morning. “Your credit scores are almost perfect,” he said happily.
“Based on your income, you can qualify for a mortgage of about
$500,000.”

What about my alimony and child-support obligations?
No need to mention them. What would happen when they saw the automatic
withholdings in my paycheck? No need to show them. If I wanted to buy a
house, Bob figured, it was my job to decide whether I could afford it.
His job was to make it happen.

“I am here to enable dreams,” he
explained to me long afterward. Bob’s view was that if I’d been
unemployed for seven years and didn’t have a dime to my name but I
wanted a house, he wouldn’t question my prudence. “Who am I to tell you
that you shouldn’t do what you want to do? I am here to sell money and
to help you do what you want to do. At the end of the day, it’s your
signature on the mortgage — not mine.”

You had to admire this
muscular logic. My lenders weren’t assuming that I was an angel. They
were betting that a default would be more painful to me than to them.
If I wanted to take a risk, for whatever reason, they were not going to
second-guess me. What mattered more than anything, Bob explained, was a
person’s credit record. History seemed to show that the most important
predictor of whether people defaulted on their mortgages was their
“FICO” score (named after the Fair Isaac Corporation, which developed
the main rating system). If you always paid your debts on time before, the theory went, you would probably keep paying on time in the future.

So, Andrews told the mortgage broker that his wife's income would be important, but for some reason she was not included on the mortgage application, which (as best I can infer) was only in Andrew's name. Why was she not part of the mortgage application? Well, she had future prospects but no current income, so that would be a possible reason to omit her. But surely there is a possibility that her previous bankruptcy would have been a huge disqualifying red flag.

Whether the mortgage broker knew of her previous bankruptcy is left as a mystery - it's hard to believe her credit score was perfect, so I infer that when Andrews claims to have been told that "Your credit scores are almost perfect" it means that he had more than one nearly perfect score. Is that written to be intentionally deceptive? Did the Times editors deliberately let that pass, or were they also in the dark as to the real story? Who knows? It's certainly not clear from the Hoyt defense or Andrews' response to McArdle that the Times editors were apprised of the situation.

So, is this a story of greedy mortgage brokers or nearly fraudulent mortgage applications? I am pretty sure the latter tale would not be publishable, which would hardly suit Mr. Andrews current financial plan, which is to hit it rich with a best-seller, however phony.

Is this Mr. Hoyt's idea of full and fair reporting? Knowing about the wife's prior bankruptcy makes reading this article even more challenging than doing a crossword puzzle, as the reader tries to figure out what Andrews is dancing around and what really went on.

I am sympathetic to the notion that in the current environment the NY Times wants to help out any of their reporters trying to make a buck on the side. But I wonder at how much of their reputation and credibility they are prepared to invest in his venture.

May 24, 2009

It is fundamental to the nature of the anti-war left that they will turn on the war in Afghanistan but Josh Marshall is not even bothering to put up a facade of consistency:

How Much Do Safe Havens Matter?

I'm still trying to decide what I think about this question. But
given how much strategic focus we're giving to Afghanistan, I'm
confident we haven't given the question enough collective thought. Matt
Yglesias had a post a couple months ago asking a basic question: how much does it really matter if al Qaida has safe havens in Afghanistan?

To be clear, no one's saying it doesn't matter at all. But does it matter enough,
relative to other threats, to make Afghanistan -- and specifically, the
escalation of our involvement in Afghanistan -- close to the focus of
our whole foreign policy? Ethnic Afghans have played little or no role
in any of the major terrorist incidents of the last decade. And most
were planned and organized either in Europe, the US or in other Arab or
majority Muslim countries. The training camps we hear a lot about
mainly focused on light combat training and maybe car-jackings. As Matt
puts it, the 'safe havens' in Afghanistan were neither necessary (the
training could be and often was done elsewhere) nor sufficient (you
still needed cells in the target countries) conditions for any of the
major terrorist attacks. So why is this such a critical focus of our
policy?

Oh, I'll grant that it is a serious question - I noted in February that stepping up the attacks on the safe havens at the border helped prompt a Taliban migration deeper into Pakistan, with potentially ghastly consequences.

But after seven years of lamenting that Bush has lost the focus on Bin Laden, this is too rich. Just where do we suppose Bin Laden is hiding if not the safe havens? Now that Iraq is winding down a bit do we just let Bin Laden go, too?

Dr. Marshall notes the absurdity:

And let me finish on two further points. Through much of the last
decade, I've been in the group of people saying that Iraq was a
distraction and that Afghanistan was the place we really needed to be
focusing on. So this is in conflict with much I've said before.

Yes it is. Look, we all "know" that Obama claimed to be opposed to the Iraq war and focused on Afghanistan and Bin Laden because that enhanced his national security cred, not because he had any real commitment to being a war President. Dr. Marshall now reveals himself to be of the same mindset. Well, fine - let's just hope Obama can flip-flip on Afghanistan a bit more gracefully.

May 23, 2009

WASHINGTON — The United States is now
relying heavily on foreign intelligence services to capture,
interrogate and detain all but the highest-level terrorist suspects
seized outside the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to current and former American government officials.

The change represents a significant loosening of the reins for the
United States, which has worked closely with allies to combat violent
extremism since the 9/11 attacks but is now pushing that cooperation to
new limits.

In the past 10 months, for example, about a half-dozen midlevel financiers and logistics experts working with Al Qaeda
have been captured and are being held by intelligence services in four
Middle Eastern countries after the United States provided information
that led to their arrests by local security services, a former American
counterterrorism official said.

In addition, Pakistan’s intelligence and security services captured
a Saudi suspect and a Yemeni suspect this year with the help of
American intelligence and logistical support, Pakistani officials said.
The two are the highest-ranking Qaeda operatives captured since President Obama took office, but they are still being held by Pakistan, which has shared information from their interrogations with the United States, the official said.

The current approach, which began in the last two years of the Bush
administration and has gained momentum under Mr. Obama, is driven in
part by court rulings and policy changes that have closed the secret
prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency, and all but ended the transfer of prisoners from outside Iraq and Afghanistan to American military prisons.

Apparently this is "rendition-lite" since the original arrest is made by the foreigners.

Human rights advocates say that relying on foreign governments to hold
and question terrorist suspects could carry significant risks. It could
increase the potential for abuse at the hands of foreign interrogators
and could also yield bad intelligence, they say.

Yeah, yeah, now its our job to capture, hold, and treat politely every bad guy in the world. I assume that intelligence professionals are also unhappy that they are not in control of the interrogations; that is one reason we scaled back renditions and adopted the enhanced interrogation program in 2002.

He said the C.I.A. would be likely to continue to transfer detainees
from their place of capture to other countries, either their home
countries or nations that intended to bring charges against them.

As a safeguard against torture, Mr. Panetta said, the United States
would rely on diplomatic assurances of good treatment. The Bush
administration sought the same assurances, which critics say are
ineffective.

Which way to the beach? I know you've got your sunscreen and a cold beverage or two, but what you lack are some real beach-style page turners. Here are two suggestions.

First, Jack is back. Lee Child has a new Jack Reacher novel out - Gone Tomorrow
. Fans of the series will enjoy this latest, which is heavy on plot and light on Reacher's biography. If you don't know Jack, you can go all the way back to "Killing Floor", where he first appears.

Second, for fans of the weather (and everyone takes about it!), Landstrike
is the hurricane techno-thriller that will blow you away. Katrina takes a bite of the Big Apple - check it out.

"I keep saying to my wife, we can't make these open-ended commitments with no end-game and no exit strategy."

"You're right, Afghanistan is one more huge problem Obama inherited."

"I was talking about coming to this party...."

In sports news, King James kept alive the dream of a Kobe-LeBron final with the sort of last-second shot that makes legends. Does anyone care? Of course not, but the prospect of the K-Mart and the Denver Nuggets going to the canvas against whoever it is that plays for the Orlando Magic has broadcast executives on a suicide watch.

May 22, 2009

Rich Lowry recaps Obama's speech. I will steal his close and exhort you to read the rest:

Excoriating Bush is good politics for Obama, which is
what makes his repeated exhortations to look ahead so disingenuous. In
his speech, he rued that “we have a return of the politicization of
these issues.” In other words: Dick Cheney, please shut up. But when
did the politicization of these issues end? Has the Left ever stopped
braying about Bush’s war crimes?Obama bracingly politicized
these very issues on the stump, staking out unsustainably purist
positions because they suited his momentary political interest. Now
that’s he’s president, he wants the debate to end. He’s above the
grubbily disputatious culture of partisans and journalists. And he’s
above contradiction because, as ever, he occupies the middle ground,
one “obscured by two opposite and absolutist” sides: those who
recognize no terrorist threat and those who recognize no limits to
executive power.And there Obama stands, bravely holding his flanks against straw men on all sides.

Let me repeat: I am not going to release individuals who endanger the
American people. Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war
with the United States, and those that we capture -- like other
prisoners of war -- must be prevented from attacking us again. Having
said that, we must recognize that these detention policies cannot be
unbounded. They can't be based simply on what I or the executive branch
decide alone. That's why my administration has begun to reshape the
standards that apply to ensure that they are in line with the rule of
law. We must have clear, defensible, and lawful standards for those who
fall into this category. We must have fair procedures so that we don't
make mistakes. We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so
that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified.

Over to the Tiger:

Not to be overly Manichean, but President Obama either has complete
control of the disposition of all of the Group Five detainees, or he
does not. If he does, his guarantee is worth something; if he does not,
then there exists the possibility that the power to release such
detainees will be out of his hands. Or am I missing something?

And Dan Froomkin:

He spoke of sending many detainees to face trial in federal courts --
but then promised that no one would be released who endangers our
national security. The whole point of a fair judicial system is that
the executive can't guarantee the results.

Well, I can tell you how the Obama side would rationalize that. The notion that a detainee is dangerous is based on some set of facts and evidence. The reviewing authority, when presented with that evidence, will reach the same conclusion any sensible person would. Therefore, if the detainee is dangerous, he will continue to be detained; if not, he will be set loose, as is appropriate, and as has been done many times already.

Now, the problem with that is obvious - it may be that we are holding people for whom the evidence is murky. In which case, Obama is willing to substitute the rules and judgment of the reviewing authority for his own judgment, while guaranteeing their result. Bold talk from a guy protected by the Secret Service.

And what about the possibility that evidence of a detainee's dangerous nature is inadmissible or unavailable (E.g., perhaps a key witness has subsequently died)? I have no explanation. However, we have his guarantee that the classic Dirty Harry scenario where a killer is cut loose on a technicality can't occur. Depending on the latitude of the rules governing the reviewing authority that promise might even mean something.

Put differently, Obama is not guaranteeing in advance a particular outcome for dangerous detainees. He is guaranteeing that his fact- and rule-based process will never cut someone loose in defiance of common sense and good judgment. Working in his favor - most of the relevant evidence will be classified, so who will be able to question publicly and cogently the results of the process?

Sobbing Kindergarteners Snubbed for Steelers?Kids locked out of White House; officials say they were too late

Thursday was supposed to be the highlight of the year for more than 100 kindergarteners from Stafford County, Va. They got up early and took a chartered bus to the White House for a school field trip. But when they arrived, all the 5-year-olds got was a lesson in disappointment.

The buses from Conway Elementary arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue a little later than planned, and they were locked out.

"We were going to the White House, but we couldn’t get in so I felt sad," 5-year-old Cameron Stine said.

Parents
say they were just 10 minutes late for their scheduled tour. School
officials say White House staff said they needed to get ready for the
president's event with the Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers, so they couldn't come in.

Time and traffic conspired to keep Stafford County school kids out of the White House yesterday.

In a situation most local commuters can relate to, kindergartners from
Conway Elementary School were shut out of a scheduled White House tour
when they showed up late.

Parent and chaperone Paty Stine said buses left Conway
Elementary at 8:30 a.m. She said they were supposed to arrive at 1600
Pennsylvania Ave. between 10 and 10:15 a.m.

"Unfortunately, we ran into heavier-than-normal traffic," she
said. When they arrived at 10:25 a.m., the gates were closed, with the
kids on the outside looking in.

"I just think the White House should have made a little bit of
leeway time," Stine said. "The kids knew what they were going to see,
and they were thoroughly disappointed. Kids were crying, teachers were
crying."

We have the teacher's unions, we have sobbing kids, we have angry voters - clearly a head has to roll. I suppose it's too late to offer them a ride on Air Force One...

The History Channel has a bit of a puzzle with some anti-American ads that won a prestigious Clio award yet are now being disavowed and disappeared. Hey, this is the sort of work that earns bloggers the big bucks.

William Saletan is dead-on, but maybe a bit early. High tech swimsuits are producing breakthrough times, which does not have to be a problem, but lots of manufacturers are getting into the act, and that is troubling. Over to Saletan:

If you want to pick a good suit and put everybody in it, fine. But we
can't have an ongoing arms race among manufacturers that determines all
the records and who sets them.

The winners in the 2012 Olympics will be the top swimmers who also guessed right about the best suit design, unless the rules are changed.

Well. As long as Michael Phelps wins a bunch of golds and we beat the French in a relay I won't care.

1. Obama said the following about what he called America’s “brutal methods” of interrogation: “They
risk the lives of our troops by making it less likely that others will
surrender to them in battle, and more likely that Americans will be
mistreated if they are captured.”

In my view, the
first part of that statement is arguable — “They risk the lives of our
troops by making it less likely that others will surrender to them in
battle.” But the second part is flat-out false. Qaedists determine how
they treat Americans by how Americans treat Qaeda detainees?
Ridiculous. There is no reciprocity in the Qaeda playbook or mindset.
They simply chainsaw away.

I regard this
as an embarrassingly naive comment from the president of the United
States. I wonder who fed him the notion — or whether he made it up
himself or what.

I agree, but Obama is far from alone with this view of detainee reciprocity. John McCain, Colin Powell, Admiral Mullen (the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman), and many other military officers make the same troop protection argument.

They may be right with respect to an enemy such as China, or even Iraq's regular army; it is absurd to think they could be right about troops captured by Al Qaeda. Howver, Obama is far from alone or original on this point.

[Pre-gaming...] I have just flipped on the live coverage of The One's speech on national security and my goodness - peevish Obama seems really irritated with us for expecting him to deal with these issues. As a good (and now abashed) citizen I almost want to send him some sort of apology note. Almost.

I will need to wait for a transcript but the line that struck me was something like 'I have no interest in spending all of our time relitigating the policies of the past eight years.' That sort of came with the job, though, didn't it?

MORE: Obama's defense of the release of the OLC memos is utterly phony. He argues that the memos don't give terrorists any useful information about how to resist US interrogation since Obama has already banned the techniques described in the memos. That makes a mockery of the panel he created (as part of the Executive Order establishing the Army Field Manual as the basis for all interrogations, including the CIA) that is studying the possibility of alternative techniques for the CIA; the panel is meant to report back in July.

Come July, the panel will recommend the alowance of certain enhanced techniques other than waterboarding, and the terrorists will be well informed as to what those techniques are.

SPOKEN LIKE A LAW PROFESOR: Obama declares he will run the Executive as a co-equal branch of government with Congress and the Courts. Another unilateral surrender!

CLOSING GITMO: Obama reiterates the pledge to close Gitmo, but I didn't hear any deadline. The Fierce Urgency of Someday.

DUELING CARICATURES: Obama characterizes the national debate as having divided us into two poles - the left believes that almost no national security issue takes precedence over transparency and the right has a view that can be summed as "Anything Goes".

Really? "Anything goes"? Did he actually read the OLC enhanced interrogation memos, which made it clear that lots of things wouldn't go?

As a rhetorical device, I am not sure how offending both sides is helpful.

And it gets better! President Answerman explains that 'these problems can easily be solved if we approach them with honesty, care, and common sense.'

So - are both lefties and righties lacking all three of those desirable qualities, or is it split somehow - maybe righties are dishonest but lefties lack common sense? Puzzling. Well, my common sense (and my WaPo) tells me that sometimes a rough interrogation can be both effective and fall short of torture - I guess I am either dishonest, careless, or foolish. Or all three!

DID I HEAR THAT CLOSE? In Obama's conclusion he says that national security must be a goal which unites all Americans. I don't think righties will quarrel with the goal, but I would have guessed that our friends on the left would have liked to see civil liberties get equal billing as a national priority.

MY SOUNDBITE: Lefties will loathe it, righties won't believe it. My caveat - "lefties" doesn't include a broad swath of the left. The Small Boys, Joe and Ezra Klein, will swoon, elevate, transport, or whatever they always do after an Obama speech. But I am betting Sully and Greenwald will fume.

[AFTER-ACTION: Sully is currently loving it - "At first blush, I find the balance near pitch-perfect - on detention, torture, interrogation and Gitmo". He wants a few days to ponder the gretness, and I can't wait for the second blush.

Greenwald opines that talk is cheap, which is troubling since talk is what Obama is all about:

Like all political officials, Obama should be judged based on his
actions and decisions, not his words and alleged intentions and
motives. Those actions in the civil liberties realm, with some
exceptions, have been profoundly at odds with his claimed principles,
and this speech hasn't changed that. Only actions will.

CHENEY'S SPEECH: The text is here. Visually, this is the expected mismatch. What bright light put Cheney in a death-black suit, or was that a deliberate Darth Vader tribute?

Cheney pounds the table for the release of the memos that marked the successes of the enhanced interrogation program, insisting we have only heard half the story. I see another Obama climbdown coming.

On enhanced interrogation, Cheney delivers the defense of the program and the CIA professionals who implemented it that the CIA would like to hear from Obama, but won't. A flavor:

Those are the basic facts on enhanced interrogations. And to call this
a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who have
saved American lives, and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent
victims. What’s more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation
methods in the future is unwise in the extreme. It is recklessness
cloaked in righteousness, and would make the American people less safe.

SOMEONE LIKED THIS:

But in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed.

Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!

THIS WORKS:

Critics of our policies are given to lecturing on the theme of being
consistent with American values. But no moral value held dear by the
American people obliges public servants ever to sacrifice innocent
lives to spare a captured terrorist from unpleasant things. And when an
entire population is targeted by a terror network, nothing is more
consistent with American values than to stop them.

As a practical matter, too, terrorists may lack much, but they have
never lacked for grievances against the United States. Our belief in
freedom of speech and religion … our belief in equal rights for women …
our support for Israel … our cultural and political influence in the
world – these are the true sources of resentment, all mixed in with the
lies and conspiracy theories of the radical clerics. These recruitment
tools were in vigorous use throughout the 1990s, and they were
sufficient to motivate the 19 recruits who boarded those planes on
September 11th, 2001.

The United States of America was a good country before 9/11, just as
we are today. List all the things that make us a force for good in the
world – for liberty, for human rights, for the rational, peaceful
resolution of differences – and what you end up with is a list of the
reasons why the terrorists hate America. If fine speech-making, appeals
to reason, or pleas for compassion had the power to move them, the
terrorists would long ago have abandoned the field. And when they see
the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or
whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don’t stand
back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged
us all along. Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for
– our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short,
they see weakness and opportunity.

ALSO GOOD:

The enhanced interrogations of high-value detainees and the
terrorist surveillance program have without question made our country
safer. Every senior official who has been briefed on these classified
matters knows of specific attacks that were in the planning stages and
were stopped by the programs we put in place.

This might explain why President Obama has reserved unto himself the
right to order the use of enhanced interrogation should he deem it
appropriate. What value remains to that authority is debatable, given
that the enemy now knows exactly what interrogation methods to train
against, and which ones not to worry about. Yet having reserved for
himself the authority to order enhanced interrogation after an
emergency, you would think that President Obama would be less
disdainful of what his predecessor authorized after 9/11. It’s almost
gone unnoticed that the president has retained the power to order the
same methods in the same circumstances. When they talk about
interrogations, he and his administration speak as if they have
resolved some great moral dilemma in how to extract critical
information from terrorists. Instead they have put the decision off,
while assigning a presumption of moral superiority to any decision they
make in the future.

CHENEY'S CLOSE:

For all that we’ve lost in this conflict, the United States has
never lost its moral bearings. And when the moral reckoning turns to
the men known as high-value terrorists, I can assure you they were
neither innocent nor victims. As for those who asked them questions and
got answers: they did the right thing, they made our country safer, and
a lot of Americans are alive today because of them.

Like so many others who serve America, they are not the kind to
insist on a thank-you. But I will always be grateful to each one of
them, and proud to have served with them for a time in the same cause.
They, and so many others, have given honorable service to our country
through all the difficulties and all the dangers. I will always admire
them and wish them well. And I am confident that this nation will never
take their work, their dedication, or their achievements, for granted.

Thank you very much.

THE SCORECARD: OK, lefties will loathe this speech since this is Dick Cheney, but righties will be enraptured.

Well, if Cheney can position this as Republicans defending the CIA against Democratic investigations and prosecutions, he will achieved one of his goals.

AFTERWARD: CNN ran dueling film clips on enhanced interrogation - Obama claimed that as Commander in Chief he has seen the intelligrnce and knows that the enhanced techniques were not necessary; Cheney defended them. Obama's obvious problem - he was dead-set against waterboarding before he was Commander in Chief with full access to the intelligence. What, is he a lucky guesser?

The four men arrested Wednesday night
in what the authorities said was a plot to bomb two synagogues in the
Bronx and shoot down military planes at an Air National Guard base in
Newburgh, N.Y. were petty criminals who appeared to be acting alone,
not in concert with any terrorist organization, the New York City
police commissioner said Thursday.

The men were arrested in an elaborate sting operation at around 9
p.m. on Wednesday after planting what they believed to be bombs in cars
outside the Riverdale Temple, a Reform synagogue, and the nearby
Riverdale Jewish Center, an Orthodox synagogue.

In a news conference at the Riverdale Jewish Center, one of the two
synagogues said to be the targets of the plot, the commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly,
offered new details about the four defendants — James Cromitie, David
Williams, Onta Williams and Laguerre Payen — all of whom are to
arraigned in Federal District Court in White Plains, N.Y., later
Thursday morning.

The men, all of whom live in Newburgh, about 60 miles north of New
York City, had met in prison. Mr. Cromitie, 53, who authorities
described as the plot’s leader, had lived in Brooklyn and had as many
as 27 arrests for minor crimes both in upstate New York and in New York
City, Mr. Kelly said. Mr. Cromitie, David Williams, and Onta Williams
were native-born Americans, while Mr. Payen was born in Haiti and is a
Haitian citizen.

The four men arrested are all Muslim, a law enforcement official
said. Mr. Cromitie, whose parents had lived in Afghanistan before his
birth, had told the informant that he was upset about the war in
Afghanistan and that that he wanted to do “something to America.” Mr.
Cromitie stated “the best target” — the World Trade Center — “was hit
already,” according to the complaint.

Mr. Kelly said: “They stated that they wanted to commit jihad. They
were disturbed about what was happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
that Muslims were being killed. They were making statements that Jews
were killed in this attack and that would be all right — that sort of
thing.”

“It speaks to our concern about homegrown terrorism,” Mr. Kelly said.

Let's see - this helps Obama because it reassures people that his team can keep us safe.

Or, this hurts Obama because it reminds people that the terror threat is real and ongoing and we can't Move On. I'll go with "hurts". And geez - if three of the four guys had to be US citizens, why couldn't they have been violent vets, computer jocks, or disgruntled animal-rights activists like Janet Napolitano warned us about?

Instead we get what earnest libs will not doubt consider to be the ultimate longshot - four Muslims hoping to blow up a synagogue.

Well. Per Commissioner Kelly they were "disturbed about what was happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan". Oh, no, not Gitmo? Not Iraq? Obama is going to run out of places from which to withdraw.

Washington -- Rep. Pete Hoekstra says he's just trying to
stand up for those at "the tip of the spear" in the fight against
terrorism. Democrats say he's trying to tear down their party's leader
in the House -- and boost his own campaign for governor.

Regardless
of the motivation, the Holland Republican has never been more in the
national spotlight. The ranking Republican on the House Intelligence
Committee, Hoekstra has become the GOP's point man in attacks on House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, accusing the speaker of demoralizing intelligence
professionals by pushing for investigation of Bush-era interrogation
tactics and suggesting the CIA was misleading in post-9/11 briefings on
those tactics.

..."She has become a single-person wrecking crew going through the intel
community," said Hoekstra, who accuses the speaker of seeking to
prosecute rank-and-file CIA personnel who were following orders and
legal guidance from elected officials.

In an interview with editors and reporters, Mr. Hoekstra said Mrs.
Pelosi, California Democrat, hasn't done anything illegal that would
disqualify her from being speaker, but said Democrats will have to
decide whether she is the right person to lead them. Still, he said,
from his standpoint, she has endangered the country.

"She has single-handedly become a wrecking ball, a wrecking
crew through the morale of the intelligence community," he said. "These
are people that have been on the front lines. They have seen their
friends die, and they have taken risks to keep America safe, and this
speaker has now said you may be prosecuted."

To which I will add that on a Wednesday call with bloggers, Rep. Hoekstra said of Ms. Pelosi that "The actions she has taken have made us more vulnerable".

The Dem pushback on the CIA morale problem is not wholly satisfying:

Nonsense, said a Democratic aide, who responded to Hoekstra's charge on condition of anonymity.

The
aide said President Barack Obama has long said low-level intelligence
officers won't be prosecuted, making Hoekstra's claim false.

No, Obama has said that officials who acted within the guidance provided by the Justice Department won't be prosecuted. I suspect there are CIA officials who went near enough to the line to be worried, and there are probably some who went over it. It remains an open question whether the DoJ will aggressively investigate these possibilities.

MILAN — A judge here ruled Wednesday
that the trial of Italian and American intelligence agents accused of
kidnapping an Egyptian cleric suspected of terrorism would continue
even though critical evidence had been ruled inadmissible, severely
undermining the prosecution’s case.

The judge, Oscar Magi, rejected a defense motion to throw out the
charges, based on an Italian Supreme Court ruling issued this year that
barred the use of classified information in the proceedings. He ruled
that the prosecution could resume its case but that it could not refer
to top secret information, including joint operations involving Italian
and American spy services.

The Supreme Court ruling has resulted in the exclusion of much of
the prosecution’s evidence, including material seized from Italian and
American intelligence operatives, narrowing the chances of a ruling in
favor of the cleric.

“We’re continuing, but it is more of a formality,” said the lawyer
for Nicolò Pollari, the former chief of Italian military intelligence,
who is among those on trial.

The case is the first to test the contentious American program of “extraordinary rendition,” in which terrorism suspects are sent for interrogation to other countries, some of which use torture. On trial are 26 Americans, all but one of them operatives of the Central Intelligence Agency, and 7 members of the Italian military intelligence agency.

They are accused of abducting the cleric, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, in Milan on Feb. 17, 2003. Prosecutors say that the cleric was flown from an American air base in Italy
to a base in Germany and then to Egypt, where he claims he was
tortured. Classified material had been at the heart of the case.

WASHINGTON — An unreleased Pentagon
report concludes that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already
transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity, according to administration officials.

The conclusion could strengthen the arguments of critics who have
warned against the transfer or release of any more detainees as part of
President Obama’s
plan to shut down the prison by January. Past Pentagon reports on
Guantánamo recidivism have been met with skepticism from civil
liberties groups and criticized for their lack of detail.

Let's hear from the critics of the last report. And what is going on in the Pentagon now?

Two administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said
the report was being held up by Defense Department employees fearful of
upsetting the White House, at a time when even Congressional Democrats
have begun to show misgivings over Mr. Obama’s plan to close
Guantánamo.

...Pentagon officials said there had been no pressure from the Obama White
House to suppress the report about the Guantánamo detainees who had
been transferred abroad under the Bush administration. The officials
said they believed that Defense Department employees, some of them
holdovers from the Bush administration, were acting to protect their
jobs.

No pressure - some DoD BushMen simply want to delay their transition to the private sector that would be hastened by releasing this troublesome report.

The report was made available by an official who said the delay in
releasing it was creating unnecessary “conspiracy theories” about the
holdup.

A Defense Department official said there was little will at the
Pentagon to release the report because it had become politically
radioactive under Mr. Obama.

“If we hold it, then everybody claims it’s political and you’re
protecting the Obama administration,” said the official, who asked for
anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation. “And if we let
it go, then everybody says you’re undermining Obama.”

Where's the trust?

MORE: This soundbite didn't quite work (my emphasis):

“It’s part of a campaign to win the hearts and minds of history for Guantánamo,” said Mark P. Denbeaux, a professor at Seton Hall University
School of Law who has represented Guantánamo detainees and co-written
three studies highly critical of the Pentagon’s previous recidivism
reports. “They want to be able to claim there really were bad people
there.”

Ahh, I get that Guantanamo critics want to convince us that some people have been wrongfully detained there but seriously - are we arguing over whether any of the Gitmo detainees are "bad people"?

Mr. Denbeaux acknowledged that some of the named detainees had
engaged in verifiable terrorist acts since their release, but he said
his research showed that their numbers were small.

“We’ve never said there weren’t some people who would return to the
fight,” Mr. Denbeaux said. “It seems to be unavoidable. Nothing is
perfect.”

"Nothing is perfect". Well, there are problems with keeping these people locked up forever, too, but nothing is perfect.

In an attempt to buck up downcast Mets fans the Times reprises some classic base running blunders. The Grand Illusion, executed on the ballfield but seemingly choreographed by the Drama Club, is my fave.

Times columnist and sensitive liberal Joe Klein actually said this about Charles Krauthammer:

"He became Ground
Zero among the neo-cons, but he's vastly smarter than most of them,"
said Time's Joe Klein, an admirer and critic who praised Krauthammer's
"writing skills and polemical skills" as "so far above almost anybody
writing columns today."

"There's something tragic about him too," Klein said, referring to
Krauthammer's confinement to a wheelchair, the result of a diving
accident during his first year of medical school. "His work would have
a lot more nuance if he were able to see the situations he's writing
about."

Hire the handicapped, then keep them in their place. Well, Klein's work would have a lot more nuance if his head weren't so far up Obama's... ahh, let's just say Klein is covering the story of Obama's hair from the inside. And speaking of Obama, birds of a feather.

Well, that is enough from me - let me wave in Jon Chait to argue the merits of what he famously described as "ass welt journalism":

Conveniently enough, I've developed a theory justifying my opposition
to convention reporting. Here it is: Reporting as a whole, while
obviously necessary, is overrated. The mania over attending news-free
conventions merely epitomizes a mentality that values going places and
talking to people above all else. This prevalent ethos was expressed in
the ur-journalism movie All The President's Men. Protesting the assignment of the Watergate story to young city-desk reporters, a Washington Post
editor notes, "I have some experienced guys sitting around," prompting
a devastating rebuke from his fellow editor: "You said it--sitting
around."

But what's so bad about sitting around? You can learn a lot sitting
behind a desk, mining the papers for interesting factual nuggets,
reading political commentary from every perspective, poring through
books and reports, and using the Nexis database to compile enormous
stacks of newspaper stories. Most journalists scorn this kind of
research because they're obsessed with
uncovering new facts, not synthesizing them.

...
Part of the problem is that journalism
terminology glorifies "shoe-leather reporting," whereby you pound the
pavement so often you wear out the soles of your shoes. Yet there's no
widely used term of approbation for the other kind of reporting. For
this very reason, my New Republic
colleague Franklin Foer and I decided a few years ago to coin a phrase:
ass-welt reporting. It means you've sat in your chair for so long
reading books and documents that you've worn a welt
the shape of your backside into your chair. I'm not saying that every
news story could be reported without leaving one's desk. (Bernstein:
"Woodward, look! I found a clip from 1971 in which President Nixon
tells the Omaha World-Herald he plans to order his goons to
break into Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Hotel!" Woodward:
"I'll cancel that meeting with Deep Throat.") I'm simply saying that,
sometimes, laziness can be the better part of valor.

"Laziness"? Grrr.

GOOD POINT: One can only imagine how great a President FDR would have been if he had managed a bit more nuance.

The usual neoconservative malingerers have been hammering me about a quote I gave to Politico, regarding Charles Krauthammer's limitations as a columnist.

Klein does not actually excerpt his own offensive quote; his link is to the first page of the Politico article, but he does not appear until the second page. Courage!

Obviously, I didn't mean to imply second-class status for disabled
people. On the contrary, the distance and perspective that comes with
physical deficits often leads to enhanced insight and abilities. The
greatest President of the past 150 140 years--(Thanks, commenter flownover!)-- sat in a wheelchair.

Regardless of what he meant to imply, we can all read what he said. Klein offers this ironic gem, without irony:

So it is possible to write brilliant, nuanced commentary—on the war in Iraq, for example—without visiting there.

Klein had better think so - his candidate formulated an entire peace plan for Iraq and Afghanistan prior to his first visit. That said, this next bit may explain Obama's retreat from his "Retreat At Any Cost" approach that won raves during the Democratic nominating process:

But it sure does help to understand a complicated situation in an
unfamiliar culture if you can see it for yourself. Indeed, I believe
the leavening effects of direct experience are especially valuable for
those who are blinkered by ideology and debilitated by extreme views.

"Debilitated"? I suppose it is better than "crippled by extreme views", but not much.

Let's include the timeless "I'm sorry if you were upset" apology:

Still, it seems clear that my remark could be construed by some as
insensitive—and if I have caused any discomfort to any disabled person,
I apologize sincerely.

Construed by "some"? And is it only disabled persons that have legitimate grounds for offense? Just for starters, what about people with a disabled friend, relative, or colleague? What about people who have worked hard for the equal treatment of the handicapped - have they no right to an apology?

What a classless buffoon. TIME ought to sentence him to covering Joe Biden.

Lawrence Wilkerson, former aide to Colin Powell, has been mocked for his dubious claim that Qaeda terrorist al-Libi, who was rendered to the Egyptians in January 2002 and had confessed to an Al Qaeda-Iraq link by Feb 2002, provided critical but false intelligence to the CIA just before Colin Powell's UN speech in February 2003. In fact, Wilkerson insisted that the "new" al-Libi evidence, by then a year old, convinced Colin Powell's of the existence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

It turns out that Wilkerson, who is passing himself off as an authority on the detainee program, is talking about the wrong detainees and the wrong Qaeda-Iraq link. This is from the Feb 6 2003 Times reporting on the Powell UN speech (my emphasis):

An intelligence breakthrough in the last several weeks made it
possible for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to set forth the first
evidence of what he said was a well developed cell of Al Qaeda
operating out of Baghdad that was responsible for the assassination of
the American diplomat Laurence Foley last October.

The
breakthrough was the work of a coalition of intelligence services from
the United States, Britain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan,
according to a senior official from one of the coalition countries.

The
Qaeda network based in Iraq has operated for the last eight months
under the supervision of Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian of
Palestinian origin who is also a veteran of the Afghan war against the
former Soviet Union, Mr. Powell said.

Critical information about the network emerged from interrogations of
captured cell members conducted under unspecified circumstances of
psychological pressure, the coalition official said. But a lucky break
also figured prominently -- a satellite phone conversation gave away
the location of a Qaeda operative, Mr. Zarqawi's deputy, driving out of
Iraq.

Until about three weeks ago, Mr. Powell was said to be reluctant to
go before the Security Council with a case connecting Al Qaeda with the
Iraqi leadership. ''Colin did not want to be accused of fabricating or
stretching the truth,'' a coalition official said.

That all
changed, the official said, when the interrogation of Mr. Zarqawi's
deputy began to yield the first detailed account of the network's
operations in Iraq, the Middle East and Europe.

The network
was planning terrorist attacks in a half dozen European countries, Mr.
Powell said, adding that recent police raids in France and Britain,
where one police officer was killed, stem from the disruption of the
Iraq-based network. About 116 operatives have been connected to it, he
said.

When all the shards of intelligence came together
today, along with new information on Iraq's secret programs to develop
chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, Mr. Powell's presentation was
a more detailed and well-documented bill of particulars than many had
expected.

Here is the relevant portion of Powell's UN speech. Although al-Libi is mentioned, the Zarqawi link discussed by the Times is featured more prominently.

So Wilkerson is right that late-breaking intelligence from the interogation of detainees under uncertain circumstances closed the sale with Colin Powell. Have those detainees since recanted and explained that Zarqawi was not operating in Iraq? Probably not.

As to Wilkerson's utter confusion on which intelligence swayed Powell, folks can judge for themselves the impact on his credibility.

Ricjard Armitage, former Deputy Secretary of State and Colin Powell's right hand man and confidante, talked about BushCo and torture in an April 15 2009 interview. His story does not seem to be consistent with the recently released narrative of briefings and legal opinions put together by Eric Holder's DoJ. Baffling.

Here is Armitage, as reported by the AP:

Washington - A former No. 2 State Department official in the Bush administration
says he would have resigned if he had known the CIA was subjecting terrorism
suspects to waterboarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning.

... "Had I known about it at the time I was serving, I would've had the courage
to resign. But I don't know. It's in hindsight now," Armitage said in the
interview.

Armitage left the Bush administration after President George W. Bush was re-elected
in November 2004. He announced he was leaving the day following the resignation
of Colin Powell, Bush's secretary of state.

Armitage told Al Jazeera English television that no one at the State Department
knew prisoners were being abused until the Abu Ghraib scandal revealed it to
the world in April 2004.

That notion that the State Department was in the dark about detainee abuse until Abu Ghraib is consistent with the Wilkerson version; Wilkerson also worked for Colin Powell and said this in a Nov 2005 interview:

AMY GOODMAN:
This issue of torture goes back, even before the pictures that we saw
in April of 2004 of the prisoners that were tortured at Abu Ghraib. You
were there when the discussions were taking place. What was your
position? What exactly did you hear?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON:
Well, it's not so much discussions as the fact that just prior to those
photographs going public, the photographs of Abu Ghraib, the Secretary
of State walked through my door into my office and said, -- we had
adjoining offices -- and he said, “I want you to get all of the
paperwork you can, get everything together, establish an audit trail
and a chronology and so forth. I want to know how we got to where we
are.” And over the course of the next few months, I got my hands on
every piece of paper that I could, open source, classified, sensitive
and otherwise, and I built for myself a chronology, an audit trail, and
gained profound insights into how we got to where we were.

Although Wilkerson does not explicitly state that Abu Ghraib was when awareness dawned, he is certainly giving that impression, as is Armitage.

However, per the DoJ narrative describing the process behind the OLC enhanced interrogation memos, Rumsfeld and Powell were briefed late in the summer of 2003:

According to CIA records, pursuant to a request from the National Security Adviser, the Director of Central Intelligence subsequently briefed the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense on the CIA’s interrogation techniques on September 16, 2003.

The C.I.A. then gave individual briefings to the secretary of defense,
Donald H. Rumsfeld, and the secretary of state, Colin L. Powell.
Neither objected, several former officials said.

This is from the Times in March 2003 in an article exploring interrogation techniques:

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld have said that American techniques adhere to international
accords that ban the use of torture and that ''all appropriate
measures'' are employed in interrogations.

And what was "appropriate"? Maybe Powell did not know what he was endorsing, but the Times found this:

The Western intelligence official described Mr. Faruq's interrogation
as ''not quite torture, but about as close as you can get.'' The
official said that over a three-month period, the suspect was fed very
little, while being subjected to sleep and light deprivation, prolonged
isolation and room temperatures that varied from 100 degrees to 10
degrees. In the end he began to cooperate.

Well. Maybe Colin Powell kept his Sept 2003 enhanced interrogation briefing secret from Armitage, his right-hand man of many years who had a military background and every security clearance in the world. Possible!

Or maybe the briefing on enhanced interrogation was woefully incomplete and waterboarding was never mentioned - that was one of Nancy Pelosi's evolving claims about her briefing a year earlier, although Porter Goss sort of disputes it.

Or maybe Armitage is blowing smoke to protect his own reputation and that of Colin Powell. Also possible.

I would welcome some assistance in tracking down Colin Powell's statements about what he knew and when he knew about enhanced interrogation. So far I am not finding much.

MORE: If you are hazy as to the meaning of "bob and weave", check out Colin Powell being grilled by Rachel Maddow last April. Apparently, Powell will have to wait until the memos come out to figure out what he knew.

May 19, 2009

Zachary Roth of Josh Marshall's TPMuckrakers delivers a newsbreak described as yet another reason to doubt the accuracy of the CIA report on who was briefed when on enhanced interrogation techniques:

Almost every briefing described in the document
-- including the September 2002 Pelosi briefing that's directly at
issue -- refers to "EITs," or enhanced interrogation techniques, as a
subject that was discussed. But according to a former intelligence
professional who has participated in such briefings, that term wasn't
used until at least 2006.

Uh huh. Then do my tired eyes deceive? Here in the opening sentence of the May 30 2005 OLC memo to CIA Counsel John Rizzo I see this:

You have asked us to address whether certain "enhanced interrogation techniques"...

As if by eerie coincidence the phrase also appears in the May 10, 2005 memo.

Well. I can't find the phrase in the 2002 memo and it may well have not been in vogue when Ms. Pelosi was briefed, but I am skeptical of this 2006 dating on offer from the Muckrakers.

MORE: No usage of "enhanced interrogation techniques" appears in the Times prior to 2006; maybe that was what the former intelligence professional had in mind.

Mr. Joscelyn also notes that there was plenty of prior evidence of contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq, although arguably not enough to rise to the level of a strategic relationship.

But to his analysis I would add that the Senate Select Subcommittee on Intelligence did not take particular issue with the pre-war intel linking Iraq to Al Qaeda, nor did they document streams of debunked confessions from high value detainees.

Well. If progressives don't want to abandon this Wilkerson meme (also promulgated by J Marshall and A Sullivan), perhaps they will want to shift gears and point to the lack of debunked confessions as more proof that torture does not work.

Walter Pincus commences the drumbeat for allowing CIA interrogation techniques beyond those allowed in the Army Field Manual. That is my call for the Obama flip-flop of the summer, so it's nice to see the CIA Leak Brigade make the expected appearance.

THE TRUTH COMMISSION IS OUT THERE: One more grim consequence of a truth commission is alluded to here:

Although President Obama has said no CIA officers will be prosecuted
for their roles in harsh interrogations if they remained within Justice
Department guidelines in effect at the time, agency personnel still
face subpoenas and testimony under oath before criminal, civil and
congressional bodies.

There is no way a truth commission would fail to establish that some of the CIA interrogations went too far. And then what - Obama asks the DoJ to commence investigating and indicting CIA lifers? Yeah, that will be the way for Obama to show he is tough on terror and can be trusted with national security.

I think a truth commission hurts Obama and the Dems more than it hurts Republicans but my full rebuttal to Matt Yglesias's alternative vision will have to remain in abeyance.

PLENTY MORE OUTRAGE WHERE THAT CAME FROM: Don't forget the upcoming flip-flop on closing Gitmo within a year.

May 18, 2009

1. Tony Almeda is one of the good guys. Despite his killing of three FBI agents and the kidnapping of Jack's daughter Tony isn' t bad, he's just misunderstood. The seemingly evil acts have helped him penetrate the inner rings of the Evil Conspiracy so that he can take down the guys who killed his wife lo these many seasons ago. Think of Tony as the Severus Snape of 24.

2. Bauer Lives! The Evil Conspirators didn't plan to release a weird biotoxin and blame it on terrorists just to embarrass the current Administration. They planned to release a weird biotoxin, blame it on terrorists, and then step forward with a ready-to-go cure! Who do you want protecting you, they would then ask, the current sorry leadership or the sort of forward thinkers who can anticpate and respond to terrorist threats? Pelosi out, Cheney in by acclamation - that was the plan.

However, Severus Tony convinces the Evildoers that, since the bad guys have Bauer's daughter, they ought to cure Jack, figuring he is worth more to them alive than dead. Big Mistake by the Bad Guys since (repeat it with me) It Is Impossible To Overestimate Jack Bauer.

Jack bounces back, gets a wink and a nod from Tony, and the two of them dispatch the baddies with zest and flair. All very cool.

Well, time wil tell.

LEFT UNANSWERED BY MY PSYCHIC POWERS: A global warming awareness spot is inevitable, but will we see an ad about alcohol abuse?

Hmm, this is kind of exciting. On Sunday I Boldly Predicted that Obama's next big flip-flop would be to reinstate enhanced interrogation for the CIA (sans waterboarding, but restoring the Belly Slap, the Attention Grab, and Walling, supplementedby the Noogie and the Atomic Wedgie.)

Now, however, I see another horse in the race - Senator and daywalker James Webb is waffling on closing Gitmo by year end. He seems hung up on the odd idea that, even though closing Gitmo is a marvelous Feel Good concept, there is no visible replacement facility. BORING!

So what is the next big flip-flop by The One, restoring enhanced interrogation or delaying the closing of Gitmo? This is the kind of summertime excitement we live for.

Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former aide to Colin Powell, blasted Dick Cheney in a Washington Note posting that was cited by Maureen Dowd in her infamous plagiarized column.

Wilkerson, Dowd, and Josh Marshall (writing as Maureen Dowd) all agreed that Cheney was torturing people in order to gain evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Iraq, therefore providing political cover for an invasion of Iraq. However, there is trouble in Paradise! Thomas Joseclyn of the Weekly Standard noted that, in addition to waterboarding, Dick Cheney must have initiated a time travel program for Wilkerson's allegation to hold up. From Joscelyn:

Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well
before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its
principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting
another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun
linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even
when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their
detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more
torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced
methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet.
This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in
Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that
al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

Wilkerson’s facts do not add up. Al Libi’s original testimony regarding Iraq-al Qaeda links occurred months before Wilkerson says waterboarding was used to get this admission out of him. We know this because the DIA filed a report
saying that it did not trust al Libi’s testimony regarding the training
of al Qaeda operatives in Iraq in February 2002 -– two months before
Wilkerson says the Bush administration authorized the Egyptians to use
harsh interrogation methods on al Libi.

So, when Wilkerson writes that “the [Bush] administration authorized
[the] harsh interrogation [of al Libi] in April and May of 2002” and al
Libi “had not revealed any al Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts” until then, he
is clearly wrong. Al Libi, according to the DIA, first discussed this
putative tie between the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda before Wilkerson says that harsh interrogation techniques were authorized by Vice President Cheney.

It's a bit puzzling - al-Libi was rendered to the Egyptians in January 2002 and the DIA had reporting of a Qaeda-Iraq tie by February 2002, so my guess is that the compliant detainee to whom Wilkerson refers is Zubaydah. [UPDATE: On MSNBC Wilkerson explains that he is telling a tale of two terrorists but does not name the second.]

If their account is the accurate one, explain to me why Tenet and
McLaughlin [then the director and deputy director of the CIA] came to
Secretary Powell in February 2003–yes, 2003–with the information about
al-Libi as if it were fresh as the morning dew. Powell was ready to
throw out almost everything Tenet had given him on the contacts of
Baghdad with terrorists, particularly al-Qa’ida. Suddenly, on 1 Feb,
there was the shocking revelation of a high-level al-Qa’ida operative
who had just revealed significant contacts between al-Qa’ida and
Baghdad. Powell changed his mind and that information went into his
presentation to the [United Nations Security Council] on 5 Feb 2003. We
were never told of the DIA dissent.

Well, if their account is false please explain why the DIA documents from February 2002 exist at all. And how was al-Libi cited in CIA reports from Jan 29, 2003, Sept 2002, June 2002 and Feb 2002 if he offered his breakthrough revelations in Feb 2003? (see p. 79 of 151 in the 2006 SSCI evaluation of pre-war intelligence.)

As to explaining Colin Powell, I can think of multiple explanations, and those with better imaginations will conjure more. Perhaps Tenet and McLaughlin realized they were losing the sale and did not think that brandishing a year-old report laden with caveats would salvage their presentation. Waving a year-old report as if it were hot off the fax, on the other hand, may have had some impact. So they played Powell.

Or, Powell knew the report was problematic but later chose to explain his disastrous UN speech by blaming Tenet and McLaughlin. Or, as of the Feb 1, 2003 meeting with Tenet and Powell, al-Libi was cited in the "new" CIA report from Jan 29, 2003. The al-Libi contribution had not changed notably from previous reports, but maybe Powell became confused as to just what was new.

Or Wilkerson is right and Cheney invented time travel.

As to the CIA position on the Qaeda-Iraq link, this, from the SSCI report on pre-war intelligence, is fascinating:

That was from the Jan 29, 2003 CIA report titled "Iraqi Support For Terrorism". It certainly does not appear that Cheney's targeted torture program was working to produce the intelligence Cheney sought. As to the quality of the 2003 CIA report, in 2004 the SSCI said this:

The review revealed that the CIA analysts who prepared Iraqi Support for Terrorism made careful, measured assessments which did not overstate or mischaracterize the intelligence reporting upon which it was based.

The 2004 SSCI report includes the summary of the truths battered out of Zubaydah:

Abu Zubaydah said that he was not aware of a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida. He also said, however, that any relationship would be highly compartmented and went on to name al-Qaida members who he thought had good contacts with the Iraqis. For instance, Abu Zubaydah indicated that he had heard that an important al-Qaida associate, Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi, and others had good relationships with Iraqi Intelligence

Zubaydah opined that it would have been "extremely unlikely" for bin Laden to have agreed to "ally" with Iraq, but he acknowledged it was possible there were al-Qaida-Iraq communications oremissaries to which he was not privy.

Here were the truths battered out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:

For purposes of comparison, Committee staff requested information from the CIA on Khalid Shaikh Muhammad's (KSM) comments on an Iraq-al-Qaida relationship. The CIA provided a one page response to the staffs request that stated that Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, the planner of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States, also maintained that he was unaware of any collaborative relationship between al-Qaida and the former Iraqi regime, citing ideological disagreements as an impediment to closer ties. In addition, he was unable to corroborate reports that al-Qaida associate Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi had traveled to Iraq to obtain medical treatment for injuries sustained in Afghanistan.

(U) The CIA assessed that KSM probably is accurately describing his understanding of the relationship. Most reporting indicates that KSM did not join al-Qaida until the late 1990s and did not enter the top echelon of its decision-making leadership until after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Prior to September 2001, he was an important operational planner but had a limited rolein the administration of al-Qaida. He therefore may not have been privy to many activities pursued by other parts of the group, which could include contacts with Iraq.

There is a third detainee who is consistently redacted; since al-Libi belongs in the roster, let's guess it is him.

Demonstrating yet again the fearsome power of the Sith Lord, Maureen Dowd sets out to write a column about Dick Cheney's uncanny ability to bedevil his foes and ends up committing plagiarism. To her small relief, this will at least distract people from the factual problems in her column. Her lead:

Dick Cheney has done many dastardly things. But presiding over policies
so saturnine that they ended up putting the liberal speaker from San
Francisco on the hot seat about torture may be one of his proudest
achievements.

Oh, I'm sure he's proud to have brought Ms. Dowd down a peg, too, and I hope MoDo knows what happens next if she ignores this warning shot. However, the Sith Lord also threw Ms. Dowd a bit of rope - the plagiarism incident has distracted everyone from the erroneous timeline with which she supported her plagiarized material. Here is the problematic factual support for the plagiarized conclusion:

In The Washington Note, a foreign policy blog, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson,
Colin Powell’s former chief of staff at State, wrote that the “harsh
interrogation in April and May of 2002 ... was not aimed at pre-empting
another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun
linking Iraq and Al Qaeda.”

Well, that was what Wilkerson wrotein describing the interrogation of Qaeda operative al-Libi, but as Thomas Joscelyn of the Weekly Standard pointed out, the timeline is wrong - per reports released in 2005 and covered in the Times, al-Libi had confessed to a Qaeda-Iraq connection by February 2002. Either enhanced interrogation started even sooner than we believe, or al-Libi confessed to Qaeda-Iraq ties under conventional interrogation [or, as reported elsewhere and noted by Wilkerson, al-Libi was rendered to the Egyptians and confessed there. Well, I knew that yesterday...] [Misery loves company - Wilkerson has Marcy Wheeler spinning in circles, too. I say Zubaydah was the compliant one.]

That said, Bush did sign a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to detainees on Feb 7, 2002.

I am sure that as soon as a lefty blogger posts some clarification of this timeline problem that Maureen will run with it. Maybe even with attribution.

STILL MYSTIFYING. Here are the relevant Wilkerson passages:

Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration
authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before
the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal
priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another
terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq
and al-Qa'ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even
when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their
detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more
torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced
methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts
yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding
in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that
al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his
most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al
Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United
States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.

By Feb 2002 the al-Libi claims had made it into US intelligence reports. So the idea that the enhanced interrogation of Zubaydah stopped after the al-Libi confession makes little sense; it would make more sense to say that al-Libi's confession gave a new sense of urgency to the Zubaydah interrogation.

Well. I seem to be having a slow brain day, but the Wilkerson claim seems to be that Zubaydah didn't confess to Iraq-Qaeda ties under either conventional or enhanced interogation, even though that was the principal priority. Information about the LA airport attack and the Garuba cell that was gleaned from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was just gravy.

FWIW, this DNI summary of the High Value Terrorist Detainee program (apparently released in Sept 2006) summarizes a number of plots disrupted by the interrogation program. Do note, however, that most detainees were not subjected to enhanced techniques; this is a defense of the whole program, not the enhanced program.

If their account is the accurate one, explain to me why Tenet and
McLaughlin [then the director and deputy director of the CIA] came to
Secretary Powell in February 2003–yes, 2003–with the information about
al-Libi as if it were fresh as the morning dew. Powell was ready to
throw out almost everything Tenet had given him on the contacts of
Baghdad with terrorists, particularly al-Qa’ida. Suddenly, on 1 Feb,
there was the shocking revelation of a high-level al-Qa’ida operative
who had just revealed significant contacts between al-Qa’ida and
Baghdad. Powell changed his mind and that information went into his
presentation to the [United Nations Security Council] on 5 Feb 2003. We
were never told of the DIA dissent.

First of all, is Wilkerson seriously claiming that the Feb 2002 report is bogus and misdated? As to Tenet and McLaughlin's excitement - think of it as hype and marketing as they tried to dress mutton as lamb. Presenting Powell with a year-old report that was riddled with caveats may have struck them as less persuasive then waving a document purportedly hot off the fax machine.

Not that I think spies would ever play anyone, or that Colin Powell could get played...

May 17, 2009

Why should we bother with tedious things like facts and truth commissions? Maureen Dowd illustrates again that once the reality-based community has settled on a story line, facts are a nuisance best forgotten or overlooked.

In The Washington Note, a political and foreign policy blog, Col.
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff at State,
wrote that the “harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 ... was
not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but
discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and Al Qaeda.”

More and
more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to
prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period
when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political
information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

I used to agree
with President Obama, that it was better to keep moving and focus on
our myriad problems than wallow in the darkness of the past. But now I
want a full accounting. I want to know every awful act committed in the
name of self-defense and patriotism.

Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration
authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before
the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal
priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another
terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq
and al-Qa'ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even
when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their
detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more
torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced
methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts
yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding
in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that
al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just
"committed suicide" in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers
working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan
government to allow them to interview al-Libi....)

As Mr. Joscelyn notes, al-Libi made the claim of Iraqi-Al Qaeda contacts in February 2002 and recanted then in Jan 2004; this was reported by the Times in Oct 2005.

Maybe instead of belaboring her with new facts we could exhort Ms. Dowd to explore the facts already in evidence. Of course, that might interfere with her preferred storyline.

MORE: If Cheney was so intent on torturing detainees to confess to fictitious ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, why was his brutal effort so unsuccessful? This SSCI review of the pre-war intel failures, including the failed intelligence on Iraq-Qaeda ties, ought to be chock-a-block with debunked claims made by detainees under duress. But I can't find them cited.

And on the other side, Andy McCarthy notes the successful torture commited by George Bush as Governor of Texas, which produced evidence that induced the Clinton Administration to cite an Iraq-Qaeda tie in their 1998 indictment of bin Laden.

TO paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather
III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us
back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama
tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t.

On the same topic of Obama's backsliding towards Bush Glenn Greenwald has a poignant and amusing column that might have been titled, "Hey, Where'd Everybody Go?" Apparently Greenwald has been serious about his civil liberties tirades over the last few years and is shocked to find that for most of his fellow progressives the civil liberties shtick was only useful insofar as it could be used to bash Bush. Yeah, no one saw that coming. Andrew Sullivan was similarly shocked to find that the gay community will be asked to remain seated at the back of the bus despite having committed themselves to a President "who really seemed to get it".

Let me get ahead of the curve and reveal today a major Obama flip-flop yet to come. Back in his first glorious days in office when Obama magically closed Gitmo and ended Bush's deplorable military commissons Obama also ended torture, making the Army Field Manual the rulebook for both military and CIA interrogations.

Yet Gitmo remains open, with no credible alternative in view; the dreadful Bush commissions have been supplanted by the glorious Obama commissions; and Obama's executive order included a 180 day study of appropriate interrogation techniques for the CIA.

180 days would take us to the last quiet weeks of July. Last winter Intelligence leaders made the case that the CIA ought to be able to work under different rules, and presumably are still making that case.

So next July, be prepared to welcome back the Belly Slap, the Attention Grab, and probably even Walling. Waterboarding is too radioactive, even though Holder can't seem to articulate the case against it, so that will not be on the revised list of CIA-allowed enhanced interrogation techniques. But since the release of the OLC memos has alerted AL Qaeda trainers to the current CIA menu, look for some classified additions; I am calling for the Noogie and the Atomic Wedgie, but the lawyers will want to review that. I have no doubt that Ben Gay in the jihadist jockstrap is over the line.

And the NY Times will stand ready to endorse this. Let's reprise their comment on Obama's reinstatement of the military commissions:

The decision benefits the administration politically because it
burnishes Mr. Obama’s credentials as a leader who takes a hard line
toward terrorism suspects.

May 16, 2009

The only other lawmaker present [at pelosi's September 2002 briefing], Porter J. Goss,
then a Republican congressman from Florida who was the chairman of the
House Intelligence Committee and later became the C.I.A. director, has
contradicted her account. He said he and Ms. Pelosi were told that the
agency intended to use the harsh methods.

Republicans on Friday
continued to dispute Ms. Pelosi’s assertion that at her sole 2002
briefing as a member of the House Intelligence Committee, she was told
that the Bush administration had determined waterboarding was legal but
that it was not being used.

Did the editor actually re-read this before setting it loose on the world? If Goss heard that the CIA intended to use waterboarding, how does that contradict Pelosi's version that it had not yet been used? Surely the intention can precede the act.

Porter J. Goss,
a former C.I.A. director who as a Republican congressman from Florida
attended the September briefing with Ms. Pelosi, said in an article
published in The Washington Post that lawmakers were suffering from
“amnesia” if they “claim to have not understood that the techniques on
which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific
techniques such as ‘waterboarding’ were never mentioned.”

I am surprised that the Times descrbies as a contradiction something that, read carefully, may not be.

I am fully supportive of the notion that Nancy Pelosi is daft. Dana Milbank describes a skeptical press with much about which to be skeptical. David Freddoso points out that part of Pelosi's story changed even as she told it. But the Goss statement is just not strong enough to describe it as flatly contradicting Pelosi's version.

The White House said Friday that the administration would prosecute some detainees being held at the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in a military commission system, a much-criticized centerpiece of the Bush administration’s strategy for fighting terror.

Administration officials said they were making changes in the system
to grant detainees expanded legal rights, but critics said the move was
a sharp departure from the direction President Obama had suggested during the campaign, when he characterized the commissions as an unnecessary compromise of American values.

In a bit of a faith-based initiative the Times does not attempt to evaluate the extent to which Obama is expanding prisoner protections in order to undo the worst of Evil BushCo. Andy McCarthy at The Corner fills the breach.

The Times does deliver this shrewd analysis:

The decision benefits the administration politically because it
burnishes Mr. Obama’s credentials as a leader who takes a hard line
toward terrorism suspects.

Hmm - dumping the rhetoric about the false choice between upholding our values and protecting our country is helpful? Following the trail blazed by Bush and the Sith Lord is politically wise?

It might be - Obama's supporters have no one else to whom they might look for their version of committed and principled leadership while The One placates some of his critics on the right.